Coming clean

My favourite building in Rome, the Pantheon, is being restored. Lasers perched on a huge scaffolding tower are gradually removing every blemish from the 1,900-year-old concrete ceiling, and already the cleaned sections look wonderful. Renovation is a constant process in this city, as it struggles to keep its innumerable antiquities clean and bright. The palaces and churches of the Piazza Navona gleam with new paint, and roads that were tarmacked for decades are being carefully recobbled. Even relatively modern buildings have been given a facelift, such as the huge, Edwardian-era Vittoriano monument - better known as the wedding cake - which has now been tidied up, opened to the public and elegantly floodlit.

What next? This could be a politically tricky question. The Vittoriano was completed just before the first world war. Just after that war, Rome entered a new architectural age, that of Mussolini's fascist state. Fascist architecture may not rank high on any tourist itinerary, but the fact is that Rome has an awful lot of it. EUR, the new Rome that Mussolini began constructing south of the capital, is largely fascist. So are Rome university, Termini station, and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation offices, which were originally intended for administrators of Italy's African empire. The huge Foro Italico sports complex, built to inspire lazy Romans from their lethargy, is covered with fascist heroic athletes. More surprisingly, Mussolini's propaganda has been preserved in stone. High on the façades of ministry buildings you can still read fascist catchphrases about glory and the Patria, and see statues of patriotic peasants, workers, and mothers of the warlike generation to come (as Mussolini hoped). There is even a large obelisk proclaiming "Mussolini Dux".

Does it matter? Some might say that it's right that evidence of the past - however unsavoury - should be left, as a reminder of what has occurred. Recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a statue of the Belgian king, Leopold II, that country's most vicious colonial exploiter, who caused the deaths of millions, was re-erected (although the statue was removed again just a few hours later).

Besides, it's easy to regard Rome's fascist legacy with more amusement than horror: as just another bizarre historical layer in this endlessly fascinating city. For all their propagandist purpose the figures never quite achieve the brutal ugliness of Nazi or Soviet statuary. Some of the heroic athletes in the Foro Italico look rather unsure of themselves - and more than a little camp - as if they doubt they'll win any medals. All of this will help confirm the belief, much held in the English-speaking world, that Mussolini can be remembered with a slight smile; dictator he may have been, but compared to his colleagues Hitler and Stalin he seems relatively harmless, more buffoon than brute.

The longer I stay here and hear Italians talk about their country's past, the more I disagree. What if we forget about Hitler and Stalin for a moment, and stand Mussolini alone? All at once his record is less amusing. He gained power through gangs of former soldiers who beat up or killed anyone who stood in their way. Throughout his rule, opponents were humiliated, beaten, crippled, jailed and murdered. Italian aggression in Libya and Abyssinia led to at least 100,000 deaths. For all his boasting, his government was not even efficient, but corrupt and incompetent. His swansong regime in the last years of the war, the Nazi-backed rump state of the Republic of Salo, was renowned for its vengeful murderousness. Mussolini was no better than a Pinochet or Ceausescu. And of course it was Mussolini's political innovations that inspired Hitler, his eager disciple.

What's more, Mussolini continues to cast an ugly shadow over modern Italy and its politics. Fears of communism during the cold war meant that Italy was dominated for four decades by rightwing governments, while those who had actually resisted the Nazis as partisans were mostly relegated to the sidelines.

In recent years Mussolini has been enjoying something of a revival. His granddaughter is a parliamentarian with her own political party and there is even a wine named after the old dictator. Italy's "post-fascist" party, the Alleanza Nazionale, has become an election force and is part of Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition. A few years ago the party's leader, Gianfranco Fini, declared Mussolini to be Italy's greatest statesman, and Berlusconi has been talking up the fascist era. Recently the Berlusconi government even proposed a new law to reclass those involved in the Republic of Salo as "combatants", so giving them belated respectability, and perhaps pensions. There are constant skirmishes over memorials to partisans, and anniversaries of wartime massacres (which were committed by Italian fascists as well as German occupiers). Still, any attempts to mark the 60th anniversary of Mussolini's death on April 28 1945, are likely to remain low-key.

Elections are due next year. Berlusconi has impoverished huge numbers of Italians through his perceived failure to restrain runaway inflation, but still he is riding high in the polls against a divided left. If and when the left does regain power, the question of what to do with old fascist architecture will probably be low on its list of priorities. And yet, although it may be decades too late for a campaign of de-fascism, it's not too late for a little political symbolism, to mark what should have been more clearly marked after 1945: that a brutal regime had been disgraced and deposed, and that it was time to begin anew.

Not that I'm suggesting all fascist insignia and heroic figures should be done away with. I'm too much of a history addict for that. But couldn't something be added to Rome's endless historical layers? Perhaps some pieces of modern art (that Mussolini would have hated) to stand alongside the heroic statues on ministry façades, or to join the athletes in the fascist sports complex. And something should definitely be done about that obnoxious "Mussolini Dux" column. Why not turn it upside down, and give it a good lean, so it is perpetually falling to disaster?